This article is part of the Tommy Cat Media quick-fire series, which discusses key marketing concepts and applications tailored to specific industries in under 800 words.
Financial education is an industry that focuses on helping college or postgraduate students expand their knowledge horizons in finance Many private finance schools focus on general finance, investment banking, mergers & acquisitions, and much more.
These schools are generally for-profit private companies that need to bring in a consistent flow of clientele to keep the doors open. This means they need to constantly market themselves to generate leads for prospective students.
For students, deciding which education program to enroll in requires lots of research. Many financial education companies can benefit from implementing a solid content marketing strategy to acquire leads and new business.
Check out these suggestions below that will help amplify the content marketing strategy for higher education institutions.
Write Educational Blogs Article to Solidify Your Expertise in Finance for Brand Awareness
One technique you can use is consistently writing relevant blog articles or content that answers common questions in the world of finance.
Students nowadays tend to search the internet for answers to their questions more than previous generations. Information is literally at their fingertips.
If your company can create a blog that can serve as a resource or guide to these students you open your website to gain more traffic from the idea audience.
Great places to peruse content ideas that match your ideal audience would be open forum websites like Reddit and Quora.
If you subscribe to a channel in the finance industry and see what people are asking you can answer them in a blog post and perhaps share it on the network to get traffic to your site.
Taking a step further would be having the finance instructors of the course write content about the topics they have expertise in. This is exceptionally powerful if the instructor has influence in the industry and has an audience following.
They can publish their blog article on their social media accounts. The blog article on your site might be passed around networks and go viral. It’ll also push your brand, especially if the instructor is top-rated.
Create Downloadables such as Course Brochures or Catalogs for Lead Generation
Unfortunately for financial education companies, it can be difficult to acquire quality leads at scale. Courses can be very expensive and require lots of research from the consumer’s end before they even think about making an enrollment. But you can use that to your advantage.
Lead magnets are an effective way to get prospects into your flow. One thing that higher education companies have to spare is information related to the course being offered.
For a financial education lead magnet, I would suggest doing a course brochure, one-pager, or a catalog covering all the course offerings throughout the year.
In these deliverables, be sure to give the customer a complete overview of what to expect to learn by taking the course, background on the instructor, learning options available (online or in-person), and the dates the course runs. You might even want to try a course comparison guide that compares your course offering against your competing companies.
You can put these downloadables behind a gate on a landing page. At a minimum, collect the prospect’s email address. The more field information you collect (first name, last name, phone number, etc) the fewer conversions you’ll probably receive. The idea is to get these prospects into your funnel so you can nurture them with more information about the course they’re interested in. This works well because they’ll be researching on their own anyway.
Utilize Testimonial Videos and Course Previews for Social Proof for Nurturing and Final Conversion
Finally, once you have the prospect in the funnel, it’s your job to provide them with the knowledge and comfort to invest in their education with your company.
Social proof is an effective way to gain trust between the company and your prospect. For financial education, if you conduct video interviews with students that have audited a course and get them to share their positive experiences, you will convince prospective students who are on the fence about signing up to ultimately enroll with your school.
Conclusion
If you’re a financial education company, a content marketing strategy is a must. You need to create trust with the prospect and provide enough information for them to make an educated decision to enroll in your program.
Using techniques listed above like writing educational blog articles to showcase expertise, lead magnets to provide information in exchange for contact information, and social proof in the form of video, you will open up your brand for new business opportunities.
